What to Look for in Winter
Published on 4. August 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
496 pages
978-0-09-953953-7 (ISBN)
Description
Candia McWilliam had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed especially cruel to someone whose life depended on reading and writing. As McWilliam's sight disappeared she looked inwards and began to remember her Edinburgh childhood, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, her marriages, her children and, stalking all these memories, her increasing alcoholism.
What To Look For In Winter is a magical, uplifting and truly wise book about families and friendship, love and loss and that most elusive of things - a sense of self.
What To Look For In Winter is a magical, uplifting and truly wise book about families and friendship, love and loss and that most elusive of things - a sense of self.
Reviews / Votes
One of the most extraordinary literary autobiographies of this or any other year * The Times * An essential book in all of its aspects, a thing of beauty and of unbearable hurt, of dreadful harm and intense humanity...This is the work of a capacious, open, vulnerable and unfailingly generous soul * Scotsman * A searingly honest, beautiful book -- Kate Mosse * Daily Telegraph * One of the most devastatingly moving memoirs I've ever read...a work of beauty and truth * Independent * Miraculous -- Hilary Spurling * Guardian * The most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious and heart-rending of memoirs * Daily Telegraph * Startling and discomforting, complicated, hilarious and heartrending * Sunday Telegraph * McWilliam writes with elegance, with sardonic humour and with honesty...readers can only be grateful for this unforgettable book -- Daisy Goodwin * Sunday Times * It's a book written out of sorrow and pain and love. A book that, for all the brilliance of its author, doesn't seem completely aware of everything it has revealed -- Andrew Motion * Guardian * Beautiful, harrowing and in every way remarkable * New Statesman *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
588 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-953953-7 (9780099539537)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Candia McWilliam
What to Look for in Winter
E-Book
09/2011
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€12.99
Available for download
Person
Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988) which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994) which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and a collection of stories, Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation which harvested tendons from her leg in order to enable her to open her eyelids.